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man who became one of my dissertation directors . Fred didn’t understand feminism—I remember that, one day, he admitted, befuddled, “I still don’t get what’s
feminine
about
feminism
”—but he believed in supporting students’ interests, and mine was gender. Following Fred’s suggestion, I thought I should look at the history of embryology and Charles Darwin’s study of barnacles. (Those barnacles were hermaphroditic.) But Fred kept saying, “Look at medicine.”
Why?
I wondered.
Hermaphroditism doesn’t happen in humans past the embryonic stage.
Then a second graduate advisor who knew I was on to hermaphrodites also said, “Look at medicine.”
    So I looked. I went over to the university’s main library and pulled the second
H
volume of the worldwide index of nineteenth-century medical literature,
The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office—
the comprehensive government-run index of medical reports that eventually came to be known as PubMed. To my shock, there I found pages and pages listing case reports of human hermaphrodites from the 1800s. Hermaphroditism in newborns, in children, in adults, and in dead old people who just happened to get dissected by some lucky anatomist. Cases recorded in England, France, Germany, Poland, the United States, India, and just about every other locale known to Western medicine.
    Why had I never heard of this?
    I decided then to do my dissertation work on the history in science and medicine of what happened to the people labeled hermaphrodites in late-nineteenth-century Britain and France. These were people who either had mixed-sex anatomy externally or who were found via surgery or autopsy to have one apparent sex on the outside of the body and the other on the inside. There was a nice set of about three hundred papers, mostly medical journal articles, that I could use as my primary sources, and the period was particularly interesting because it was a time when homosexuals and women had started agitating to loosen gender norms. I figured it would be interesting to see what medical and scientific men, who tended to be politically conservative, did when confronted with
natural
sex blurring, given that their abhorrence of women’s suffrage and men-loving men was based on the “fact” that such things were fundamentally unnatural. Britain and France also made practical sense because they would be nice places to go on dissertation grants, and I could read English and French. Truthfully, the French was sometimes hard, but Fred helpfully suggested that translations often go faster if you drink a bit of wine from the region where your texts originated. (I still can’t drink French wine without thinking about sex.)
    During a cold snap in February 1994, I flew to Bethesda, Maryland, to the National Library of Medicine, to collect more material for my work. On the plane, I was seated next to an army doctor who was in charge of HIV management for the military. He asked me what I was working on, and upon hearing me describe my project, he sternly said to me over his reading glasses, “Hermaphrodites are not a marketable skill.” Even so, it was obvious he wanted to hear more.
    In history as in science, you look for what changes and what is stable, you look for correlations, and you pray to find evidence of causation. I had a lot of data to work with—more than I could manage with just my brain and marginalia—so I took my three hundred primary sources and created a computer database of their components to see what patterns I could find. I tracked specific patients based on the demographics the medical reporters gave about them, to see if they might pop up more than once in the medical literature. (This enabled me to “watch” one poor nineteenth-century Frenchwoman with a herniated testicle wander from doctor to doctor looking for some productive help.) I cataloged individual scientists and doctors to track who was reporting what when. And then I